The present invention relates to power supplies, and in particular, to power supplies for providing low voltage, high current power to such devices as portable computers such as notebook and laptop computers.
Multi-phase buck converter switching power supplies are now in use for providing low voltage, high current, high efficiency power supplies for such applications as portable computers, for example, laptops and notebook computers.
The present invention relates to a power supply wherein the output voltage or other power supply characteristic, for example, over voltage protection limit, can be set depending on load characteristic data, such as digital voltage data codes known as VID codes received from the load microprocessor being powered by the power supply. In particular, the various microprocessor manufacturers, such as Intel, AMD etc., provide tables of the voltage power inputs for their microprocessors depending on operating conditions. The microprocessor issues voltage identification (VID) codes which contain digital bits that specify the input voltage required at a particular instant, depending on the processor activity. This enables the processor to conserve energy when the load requirements are low and receive more power when requirements are high. Each manufacturer uses different VID codes and the VID codes may be different for different processor chips made by the same manufacturer.
In the past, power supplies for computer systems required dedicated power supplies capable of interpreting the VID codes for a particular processor. However, these power supplies were not capable of interpreting the VID codes for processors other than the processor for which they were designed.